SimRacing.org.uk

The last week has seen the forum grind to a halt many times and even dissappear totally from time to time. Its taken me 5mins to get to be able to post this!

 ???

Yeah. The hosting company was acquired last year and the fallout is starting to show. They appear to be mass-migrating all hosted sites to the new parent company's hosting center in Ohio and not doing a very good job of it. ::) It seems okay right now but at some points today it's taken 90 seconds just to show the forum index page, on top of which I've been getting very mixed messages about whether or not we needed to have the forum turned off while the migration happened, or indeed when the migration was supposed to happen. I'm still not sure, although touch wood we don't appear to be missing any posts or results on what I assume is the post-migration server (as I put the old one into maintenance mode).

I'm now seriously thinking about whether I want to remain with HostICan when the next renewal is due. :-\

If anyone saw the sad panda picture, that was my fault. :-[ Hopefully most people were to busy at work during the time it was hosed to have picked up the wrong DNS values.

Woohoo i'm on! Been down for a while >:(

Can we last till the next renewal? ::)

According the hosting company it's all up and running again. :wacko:

Hi Dave,

Great to see the site back up again, hopefully the worst of it is behind us. They say you only appreciate something when it's gone and that is certainly true of srou; I've missed my daily diet of UKGPL chatter :)

Thanks for your efforts over the last few days and for giving us all a focal point for sim racing in the UK.

Bit of a risk but after all the disruption, I've changed the "www" DNS entries for both UKGPL and SRou back to point at the real site. If for some reason you want to see the holding page again, just put in a ukgpl.com or simracing.org.uk address without the leading www; I'll turn those off in a day or two when everything looks to be stable again.

I can only apologize for all the disruption. :-[ Obviously our web hosting is essentially beyond my direct control, but I will certainly be looking to move providers just before my current contract expires in July, probably to Arvixe who currently host the Team Shark website.

It's nice to be home again  :jumpjoy:

 :stupid:

Well, it was a mistake turning them back on when we looked stable on CP50.myhostcenter.com... as they then moved us to CP09 (which took another two days ::) ). They've removed all the data from CP50 so it's possible that we've lost a few posts made between me losing access to CP50 (and thus being unable to switch the forums into full maintenance mode) and the data being transferred (for a second time!) to CP09.

Hopefully, fingers crossed, touch wood etc etc we're now stably on CP09 and will stay there (and up) for the time being. :surrender:

Needless to say I'm very, very upset with HostICan 't for putting us through this - not so much for the technical hitches, but for the utter lack of communication from them during the process, and the unwillingness to own up to how badly things were going.

I've already signed up for two years with Arvixe, who host the Team Shark website, but if the forums remain stable and available during today I'll do a planned migration some time in the near future, rather than just slamming the code and data over in a mad panic.

Appreciate your efforts Dave.  Thanks very much.

p.s. Thanks to everyone for your understanding and support over the last week. :angel-wings:

According to the dates on the last post at least you guys were able to login while all I got was error up until this very moment. :-X How is this kind of long absence acceptable for a highly developed country like GB? :-X

Anyways, too bad Race's race didn't take place, looking forward to continuation of our affairs. :)

Since when has Ohio been in GB?

Thanks Dave,  sounds like this has been enormously frustrating.  

It's not all bad .... we've all been much more active on the iRacing forums in the last few days :D.

thanks for the updates Dave!  ;) and getting all sorted...  :euro:

Sorry Phil, I didn't know the company was from US...  :dots:

Good to see everything up and running. Well done on sorting it out Dave. You must have the patience of a saint.

He's had plenty of training, dealing with me  ::)

 :winkiss:

Good to things back up and running, nice one, Dave ;D.

Thanks Dave, your effort is much appreciated.

Well done Dave - I know how it feels if that makes you feel any better!

Hmm, well things are still running far from smoothly.

The MySQL database server is regularly running out of connections and I've just noticed that the forum Settings.php file has regressed to a previous version; that's not very encouraging. :-\

Many thanks for your patience and persistence Dave. This is the first time I've been able to login in what seems like a week.

What a nightmare! Thanks for all your efforts over the past few days Dave  8)

It probably is a week - last Thursday was when we started seeing the first problems. It's been a heck of a palaver for a migration that was supposed to take a few minutes. ::)

The downloads.simracing.org.uk subdomain is the first one I've actually migrated across to our new hosts, Arvixe. I plan to do gallery.davegymer.org (http://gallery.davegymer.org) next as it uses its own database as well as subdomain and should therefore be a good test for my mgration strategy.

If that goes smoothly - and if we don't have any more major problems in the short term - I'll find a two day slot in the calendar (the weekend after the coming one is a candidate) with no races scheduled for anyone and pull across the whole kit and caboodle.

I'm glad we have a man as able as Dave for the site magician. :) It seemed like being lost in the nothingness without this forum.  ::)

Thanks from me too for all your efforts Dave - your patience and expertise are much appreciated.

Thanks Dave
You appreciate it more when it's gone!
Glad to see us back up and running! Good job! :)

I presume you get a decent discount for hosting the server in Egypt Dave?

Are you suggesting we stage a coup? :angel:

No chance, I've run a club forum before and it's not an enviable task ;)

Hey dave. Try http://www.gtxhosting.co.uk/ (http://www.gtxhosting.co.uk/) thats who im with and theyre great. customer support is brill.

They're also three times the price of Arvixe. :P

I know we still get occasional short bursts of unavailability, but that's going to be true of any shared hosting platform. I didn't think Arvixe had been at all bad over this last year.

Good job Dave. Much appreciated by all.